The Authentic Eclectic

Don’t Try To Learn To Trust Again

Learn To Trust Yourself Instead

Celtic Chameleon
3 min readAug 9, 2021

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Sometimes, we do not know that people are abusing us by betraying and lying to us. Those who naturally default to honesty often assume the same of others.

And yet. Would we have been so desperately, pitifully trusting if we weren’t living in the trappings of doughy civilisation? Would we have paid more attention to our primal selves if we weren’t so lulled by what we’re taught, and what we’re taught to ignore?

We’re soft. Softened by films, television, the internet, widespread gentle lies that are fed to us every day, constantly available food, modern medicine, no primal need for most of the activities that would have kept us breathing just a few generations ago. Softened by the illusion of civilisation.

The current paradigm has people worrying more about hurting someone’s feelings than about telling flat lies about reality. We are so soft many of us think that disagreement = attack.

Not those of us who have experienced actual attacks, generally, but still.

Part of that softness surely manifests in the way some of us are so blindly trusting. A lesson we should be teaching our children is that just because you are naturally honest, do not assume the same of others. Wait for proof.

Marketing

Trust is marketed, along with kindness and niceness, as a positive commodity. Well, it’s certainly helpful for predators. Not so much for the rest of us.

I should have questioned, even though he was hiding his behaviours rather well. Always be alert, always be aware. There were some clues, not obvious, but yes there were hints. I should have followed those up. I could have saved myself years of grief.

You don’t need to be hypervigilant. But do be vigilant and don’t dismiss your inner voice, all the same.

If you have learned the exquisitely painful lesson that people are not to be trusted, don’t throw that lesson away. You earned it in tears and sweat. Remember it, be circumspect.

Listen to yourself.

We have evolved our spidey senses over millennia of…

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